Environment
denialism | March 7, 2008
There is no way I could let the Heartland Institute's Global Warming conference go by without comment, especially since it's so beautifully conformed to my expectations of what a gathering of cranks would be like. I think DeSmogBlog's coverage has been the best.
But back to my expectations, we have experts of dubious quality speaking to a group of people that clearly have no ability to judge sources (from the WSJ ):
Given that line-up, and the Heartland Institute's stated mission--"to discover and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems"--two of the presentations…
clock | March 6, 2008'Power Napping' In Pigeons:
In humans, as in all mammals, sleep consists of two phases: deep, dreamless slow-wave-sleep (SWS) alternates with dream phases, called Rapid Eye Movement (REM)-sleep. Although several studies suggest that information is processed and memories are consolidated during sleep, this remains a hotly debated topic in neurobiology. Comparative studies in birds may help to clarify the function of sleep by revealing overriding principles that would otherwise remain obscure if we only studied mammals. This is because birds are the only taxonomic group other than mammals to…
gregladen | March 4, 2008It is very common, across the U.S., for science teachers to dread the "evolution" unit that they teach during life science class. As they approach the day, and start to prepare the students for what is coming, they begin to hear the sarcastic remarks from the creationist students. When the day to engage the evolution unit arrives, students may show up in the classroom with handouts from anti-science sites like Answers in Genesis, to give to their friends. They may carry a bible to the lab station and read it instead of doing the work. If there is a parent conference night around that time…
razib | March 3, 2008Josh Donlan has joined Shifting Baselines. If you don't know who Donlan is, read Re-wilding North America. A few months ago I suggested that biologists who argue against mass extinction on basically aesthetic or normative grounds need to remember that these are distinct from consequentialist homocentric and professional rationales (i.e., we must preserve for medical research and we must preserve so we can study evolution).
I think Donlan does a good job being up front about his normative biases. I tend to share those beliefs and the values which inform those beliefs. I know that some…
illconsidered | March 3, 2008 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
(skip to bottom) Top Stories:Connaughton's Deke, Svalbard, Wheat Panik, Arctic, Antarctica, Fergus' Survey, Aerial Bacteria, La Nina Winter Hurricanes, GHGs, Glaciers, THC Impacts, US Dust, Forests, Corals, Wacky Weather Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration Journals, Misc. Science, Genetic Engineering Kyoto-2, Carbon Trade, Carbon Tax, Optimal…
tetrapodzoology | March 2, 2008
I spent much of my Saturday doing an interesting thing. Together with another 30 or so people, I went along to my local nature reserve (Chessel Bay Nature Reserve, Southampton) and took part in an effort to clear the shore of its tons upon tons of human crap. Unsatisfied with our constant use of resources, our epic, manic pollution, and our rampant annihilation of other species, we aim to cover as much of the planet's surface as possible in our waste: we are literally doing our very best to swamp natural environments with the discarded shit that we can't be bothered to deal with properly.…
josh donlan | March 2, 2008I'm lying. But here I am blogging on Shifting Baselines. Over the past six years or so, I've spent a decent part of my energy thinking and writing about ecological history and its role in biodiversity conservation and society. That thinking and writing has included proposals that toy with the idea of bringing lions and elephants back to North America. Bring Back the Megafauna! a group of us proclaimed. To no surprise, our proclamation was met with gasps and groans (more about that later). When not pondering bringing the big stuff back, I spend much of my time restoring islands around the…
oracknows | February 28, 2008I didn't want to blog about this. I really didn't.
No, the reason why I didn't want to blog about this latest screed by mercury militia enabler David Kirby is not because it is about any sort of slam-dunk proof that vaccines do after all cause autism, a mistaken impression that you might get if you just looked at the crowing throughout the antivaccination blogosphere. Rather, it's because I've been forced once again to wade through Kirby's smug, self-congratulatory, and intentionally obfuscatory prose to try to figure out just what the hell he was talking about and then try to make sense of…
sb admin | February 25, 2008Most of us are lucky enough not to have to worry about our sewage. We flush the toilet, it goes away somewhere, and we don't have to worry about cholera or other diseases that spread when waste contaminates the water supply.
While most of sewage systems do a great job of making the water look clean and getting rid of bacteria and viruses, they often aren't designed to remove synthetic chemicals. With so many of us dependent on daily doses of pharmaceuticals, we're excreting lots of drugs (or their metabolites), and they're sticking around in treated wastewater. Researchers are now starting…
grrlscientist | February 25, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
King penguins, Aptenodytes patagonicus, swim off the Crozet Islands in the Indian Ocean near Antarctica. Scientists estimate that a rise in ocean surface temperature of less than half a degree over the next 20 years would lead to a population collapse.
Image: Yvon Le Maho, French National Center for Scientific Research.
Birds in Science
Primitive feathers that represent a key missing link in their evolution have been found, fossilized in 100-million-year-old amber from France. As long as scientists have studied birds…
illconsidered | February 25, 2008 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
(skip to bottom) Top Stories:BC's Carbon Tax, Garnaut Report, Solar Cities, Global Cooling Disputed Greenland, WAIS, AAAS, Permafrost, PCA, Earth Hour, CCR, Investor's Summit, ZIFs Hurricanes, Paleoclimate, DSCOVR Impacts, Central Asia, Forests, Corals, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Mitigation, Transportation, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Adaptation Journals, Misc. Science Kyoto, Carbon…
cortex | February 22, 2008Michael Specter has written a really fine article on the ambiguities and complexities involved in the measurement of carbon emissions. Sounds dull, right? It's actually full of fascinating facts:
Just two countries--Indonesia and Brazil--account for about ten per cent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. Neither possesses the type of heavy industry that can be found in the West, or for that matter in Russia or India. Still, only the United States and China are responsible for greater levels of emissions. That is because tropical forests in Indonesia and Brazil are…
greengabbro | February 22, 2008 This is a thin section from some Colorado shale. It's part of the Green River Formation, which is a series of rocks laid down about fifty million years ago when the West was wet. The shales come from a set of lakes that occupied part of what is now Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah.
If you look carefully - behind the white blotches, where the contrast is too blown out to say much but they might be grains of sand or bits of shell that fell into the lake where this was forming - you'll see that the shale was deposited in alternating layers of dark stuff and light stuff. The dark stuff is organic…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2008
The Oblivious Birder.
Jeff created this photo for use in a recent keynote address given at the Spacecoast Bird & Wildlife Fest. Clearly this was tongue in cheek as the birder is completely unaware of the oncoming traffic. However, when he gave the example all admitted that they had seen someone on past field trips where folks had to be asked to get out of the road to allow traffic to pass! He also used this photo as a segue into his look at "birder fashion"!
Image: Jeff Bouton [larger size].
Below the fold is the latest installment of the blog carnival, I and the Bird. I have arranged…
cmooney | February 21, 2008Should Congressional Democrats, led by Barbara Boxer, try to get a global warming bill passed this year, even if it's the relatively moderate (and modest) Lieberman-Warner America's Climate Security Act?
That's the matter currently dividing the environmental community, and the dilemma I address in my latest DeSmogBlog item. The answer, I would say, is that it's complicated--and where you come down really depends on how much you trust this Congress and whether you'd prefer to see a strong bill enacted later, or a weaker bill enacted sooner.
My perspective on all of this is sort of in the…
grrlscientist | February 20, 2008tags: environment, commercial fishing industry, bottom trawling, orange roughy, Chilean sea bass, seafood
Landsat satellite image, Gulf of Mexico (mouth of Vermillion Bay, Louisiana), taken on 10/12/92. Note the abundant narrow sediment trails, most in shallow water (<20m), possibly caused by trawling.
Image: SkyTruth [larger view].
Ain't technology grand? Thanks to Landsat satellite images, which are available on the internet, the ordinary citizen can now see what is happening to our planet -- but sadly, much of it is not good. For example, the above image of the Gulf of Mexico was…
clock | February 18, 2008Cheating Is Easy For The Social Amoeba:
Cheating is easy and seemingly without cost for the social amoeba known as Dictyostelium discoideum, said a team of researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University in Houston who conducted the first genome-scale search for social genes and found more than 100 mutant genes that allow cheating.
Warming Waters May Make Antarctica Hospitable To Sharks: Potentially Disastrous Consequences:
It has been 40 million years since the waters around Antarctica have been warm enough to sustain populations of sharks and most fish, but they may return…
grrlscientist | February 18, 2008tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
New wintering sites for critically endangered Spoon-billed Sandpipers, Eurynorhynchus pygmeus, have been discovered in Myanmar.
Image: Peter Ericsson.
Birds in Science
There is a lot of controversy among scientists regarding when modern birds first appeared. The current fossil record suggests that modern birds appeared approximately 60-65 million years ago when the other lineages of dinosaurs (along with at least half of all terrestrial animals) were extinguished by a bolide impact. However, it is possible that…
clock | February 18, 2008Tom Levenson is the author of three cool books so far: Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science, Einstein in Berlin and Ice Time: Climate, Science, and Life on Earth and has recently taken the science blogging world by storm with his new blog, the Inverse Square. We finally got to meet at the second Science Blogging Conference four weeks ago.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job?
I'm Tom Levenson - and my career feels to me much more as a…
illconsidered | February 18, 2008 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
(skip to bottom) Top Stories:UN CC Session, Investor Summit, AAAS Annual Meeting, ZIFs Melting Arctic, Border Jousting, Dead Zones, Earth Hour, Climate Code Red Hurricanes, Paleoclimate, ENSO, THC Impacts, Forests, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel Mitigation, Transportation, Shipping GHGs, Buildings, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Planktos, Adaptation Journals, Misc. Science Kyoto-2,…